The failure of our fathers: family, gender, and power in Confederate Alabama

"The Failure of our Fathers: Common White Families in Confederate Alabama is an in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of the most pivotal epochs in the state's history. Drawing on a wide range of personal papers, court records, government documents, and newspaper...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Ott, Victoria E. 1971- (VerfasserIn)
Format: Buch
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Tuscaloosa The University of Alabama Press [2023]
Schlagworte:
Zusammenfassung:"The Failure of our Fathers: Common White Families in Confederate Alabama is an in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of the most pivotal epochs in the state's history. Drawing on a wide range of personal papers, court records, government documents, and newspapers reflecting the state's varied regions and economies, Victoria E. Ott uses gender as a lens to examine the yeomanry and poor whites who identified with the Confederate cause. Working in a similar vein as historians Stephanie McCurry, Stephen Berry, LeeAnn White, and Laura Edwards, Ott provides a nuanced examination of how these Alabamians fit within the antebellum era's paternalistic social order, eventually identifying with and supporting the Confederate mission to leave the Union and create an independent, slaveholding state.
But as the reality of the war slowly set in and the Confederacy began to fray, the increasing threats to the survival of their families led Alabama's common white men and women to find new avenues to power as a distinct socioeconomic class. In the four decades from formation to secession, family provided small landholders and poor, landless whites in antebellum Alabama a source of power and identity through personal relationships, social connections, and economic support. Anglo-American legal conventions also provided common white men legal rights to control their dependents and property, similar to their elite counterparts. By utilizing the courts and exercising those rights, common white men staked a claim to social legitimacy and even perhaps a sense of equality alongside their wealthier brethren.
In the 1850s, as war drew nearer, a sense of kinship and the idealization of family drew common whites into the conflict to preserve social and racial hierarchies stemming from the institution of slavery. Common white men and women relied on constructs of family and gender to understand the reasons why they should fight to protect the right to secede and form a separate Confederate nation. They conceptualized the Confederacy as a larger family and the state as paternal figures devoted to protecting its loyal dependents. Through the rhetorical notions of honor and duty, they came to believe the reciprocal relationship between the fatherly protector and loyal dependents would remain throughout the course of the war. Yet, as total war increased, heaping tremendous economic and emotional burdens on Alabama's common whites, the construct of a familial structure that once created a sense of loyalty to the Confederacy now gave them cause to question its leadership.
Beschreibung:XII, 209 Seiten Illustrationen 24 cm
ISBN:9780817321475

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